Everyone here knows about the Madrid restaurant which is located at the geographical midpoint between Montreal and Quebec city and is festooned with plastic dinosaurs and big trucks. Well, there is now another reason to stop by as I am writing these lines from their parking lot. Yep, they have free wireless internet and you don’t even have to go in :-)

As I am writing these lines, every member of my household is moving a bit more slowly, fighting against muscles that would rather recuperate from yesterday’s exertions.

We had spent Saturday at my mother’s house in Sutton, a ski resort in the Eastern Townships that is a 90 min drive from Montreal. After a morning hike and a copious lunch we decided to try out the new Adventure Park. The site is essentially a series of 54 platforms, zip lines and obstacles nestled up in the forest canopy. Christiane and I had previously experienced canopy tours in Costa Rica and we expected the whole thing to be fairly easy.

We were so wrong.

Divided between four paths of increasing difficulty (green, blue, red and black) the whole thing turned out to be quite a test of our agility, equilibrium, strength and endurance. To quote my daughter, some of these obstacles were “more scary than anything at La Ronde”. We zipped down the lines, swung from a rope into a net, climbed up and down many ladders and tried to remain steady while walking on tightropes and contraptions of wood and rope. The worst for me was the middle of the black section. Just as my body was about to give up, I had to swing across on a series of 8 stirrups dangling on a cord and 50 feet up in the air. When you take that first step, it’s like walking off into the void.

But in the end, we all made it and we’ll definitively do it again.

BTW the pictures shown above were taken last Fall. We didn’t go up then since my youngest daughter wasn’t 12 years old yet. It is also a good idea to bring water and power bars. Doing all four sections can take up to three hours.

Of all the proposed infrastructure projects, none would have a biggest impact on my commute than linking the two halves of Cavendish Boulevard. For the past 8 years, I have lived in Pierrefonds and worked at the tip of Royalmount avenue. This means that there is no other option for me than to go through this urban abomination that is the juncture between Cote de Liesse and the Decarie Exchangeway. Adding an extra ten minutes to each trip (a very generous assumption) adds up to 320 hours over 8 years.

Before “one island, one city”, the strongest opposition to the project came from residents of C

Nations, states, provinces, organizations, groups of people and sometimes even company are often symbolized by their flags or logos. I realized that we’re all here talking about a great city and it has never been symbolically identified. Well, here it is.

The four symbols are a fleur-de-lys for the French, a rose for the English, a shamrock for the Irish and a thistle for the Scottish. The cross represents religion though I’ve found different interpretations from various sources. Some say, it symbolizes a military stance.

Photos

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